Confessions of a Murder Suspect by James Patterson & Maxine Paetro

Title: Confessions of a Murder Suspect (Teen Detective Series #1)

Author: James Patterson & Maxine Paetro

Publisher: Little, Brown

Release Date: September 24, 2012

Source: ARC from Publisher

Buy the Book: Amazon / Book Depository

James Patterson returns to the genre that made him famous with a thrilling teen detective series about the mysterious and magnificently wealthy Angel family…and the dark secrets they're keeping from one another.

On the night Malcolm and Maud Angel are murdered, Tandy Angel knows just three things: 1) She was the last person to see her parents alive. 2) The police have no suspects besides Tandy and her three siblings. 3) She can't trust anyone--maybe not even herself. Having grown up under Malcolm and Maud's intense perfectionist demands, no child comes away undamaged. Tandy decides that she will have to clear the family name, but digging deeper into her powerful parents' affairs is a dangerous--and revealing--game. Who knows what the Angels are truly capable of?

I am a sucker for a good mystery story and there have definitely been some really good ones in the YA world this year. James Patterson and Maxine Paetro's Confessions of a Murder Suspect definitely followed that trend. It drew me right in and, like the characters, I wanted to find out who the killer was.

On the surface, the Angel family looked perfect, but everything is not always as it seems. When Tandy Angel hears knocking at her front door in the middle of the night, the last thing she expected was for the police to storm in to her family's appartement. And for them to tell her that her parents have been murdered. Now Tandy is determined to find out who killed her parents. Except her only suspects, and the police's, are her three brother and herself. But that's not going to stop her. Tandy knows some things the police don't, and she's hoping to get to her parents' killer before the police does.

Live I've already said multiple times, I am a major sucker for any story that has a mystery in some form or another in it. There have definitely been a lot of those in YA this year so I'm always a little worried they're going to start sounding the same. But I shouldn't have been worried about that happening with Confessions of a Murder Suspect. The story was different from all the other murder mysteries. I loved how every so often there would be a break from the story and you would get a "confession" that would help explain some of the back store. Those just made me want to read on. The most interesting thing about the story was the way it was told. Instead of the narrator just telling her story, she was openly addressing the reading. It was definitely different, but it was a great way to get the reader engaged in the story.

So the Angel family. They were definitely interesting and different. On the surface they looked pretty normal, but the more I read the more I couldn't help but think that normal wasn't quite the right word to describe them. Each member of the family had something about them that made them stand out from what is considered "normal". For a long time, Tandy didn't really show a wide range of emotions. On the flip side you had Harry who was almost too in touch with his emotions. Hugo had above average physical strength, especially when you take into consideration that he was only 10 years old. Matthew's athletic prowess was way above average, even for a professional athlete. But those little things are what made the characters interesting to read about. It was great seeing them sort of break out of what their parents had moulded them to be. But they still had a long way to go before they reached "normal".

Confessions of a Murder Suspect was exactly what I was looking for. I knew all along that James Patterson was an expert on mystery or detective novels, but I wasn't sure how successful he would be doing that in YA. But I shouldn't have been worried because he and Maxine Paetro wrote a book I am excited to recommend to others.

For more information on the book, be sure to check out the HBG website.